The Partial Observer by Gayane Torosyan

No Exception

It began with a curious declaration, delivered by my then-young partner—a man of Soviet upbringing who had once studied medicine, measured skulls and embraced with unshaken resolve the notion that men’s brains are categorically larger than women’s. “But you,” he confessed, as though unveiling a revelation, “you are an exception.” His assertion was tinged not with condescension, but with the memory of his intrigue at my teenage musings on infinity. These musings, grounded in mathematics and that restless search for eternal truth, had, champagne glass in hand, taken the curious form of a white sphere—a shape at once convex and blending all colors into one.

This was not the last time I would hear the term “exception” appended to me, nor the most disquieting. A friend, herself Russian, once mirrored my outrage at the treatment of ethnic minorities, including Armenians like me, in our former homeland, where darker skin tones attracted epithets as crude as they were degrading. “It’s a relic of something vile,” she’d said, invoking Hitler in her rebuke of such prejudice. But then, with an earnestness that bordered on baffling, she added, “But you, with your blue eyes, are different—a rare exception.” In that instant, the term was transformed from flattery to indictment. To be spared the insult was, itself, a diminishment—a reminder that privilege, even when kindly intended, was often conferred selectively, uneasily.